Is Google in any way using its click-through data? Is high bounce rate always bad? What is a long click?
All of that is discussed in today’s Jim & Ann show!
The signals… the bad, the good, the neutral…
What is a good bounce rate? Are you sure you know the answer? 🙂Click To TweetA bounce can be good and bad (and it’s not about how long / short it is!)
If someone clicks on a search results and then quickly returns to Google, that’s a very bad bounce. That’s what we call pogo-sticking.
If someone clicks on a search results and then quickly clicks a link and goes to your Facebook page or somewhere else, that’s a good bounce, even though it may be a high number in your Google Analytics.
A high bounce rate may actually indicate that the user got the answer to whatever they were looking for and clicked off the page to continue their journey.
That’s what we call the long click: A click that didn’t bring the user back to search results.
You’ve got to look at what the phrases are people are using to find your site and you’ve got to ask yourself whether or not this page satisfies the user coming from the search results page.
Dwell time, the term coined by Bing’s @DuaneForrester in his old article “How to Build Quality Content”
…dwell time. The time between when a user clicks on our search result and when they come back from your website tells a potential story.
In other words, Dwell time is the time it takes the user to return back to search results:
| Time on page | GA Bounce rate | *Dwell time* | |
| Means… | The time the user spent on the web page before going ANYWHERE (may be an internal page, other link, ad, etc) | The % of visitors who didn’t go to another page of the site | The time the user spent on the web page before going BACK to search |
| Manifests… | A questionable quality signal (The user might have got the answer really fast and just left) | A questionable quality signal (The user might have just closed the page after getting the answer) | A strong quality signal (The user is likely to be looking for more info since (s)he clicked back to search results. The user is not satisfied) |
Duane even mentions what’s supposed to be a good signal:
A minute or two is good as it can easily indicate the visitor consumed your content. Less than a couple of seconds can be viewed as a poor result.
Click-through Rate
Do you believe click-through influences the rankings?Click To TweetLots of experiments (here’s the most recent one) have shown that higher click-through can boost a page on top, but just for a couple of hours.
While we do not suggest click manipulation be a recommended tactic, there are ways to improve your click-through. The most obvious is optimizing your meta description and title tag.
While meta description is not a ranking factor, it can help improve your click-through (and hence probably rankings) if you use your keywords there as well as add your competitive advantage (your best offer, coupon, etc)
Watch the whole video here: Click-through and Bounce Rate: How Google and Bing Rank Websites
